A Midsummer Night's DreamAct I

ACT I

SCENE i

Theseus, ruler of Athens — called, anachronistically, Duke (Asimov 18) as Shakespeare does not seem to know Greece like he knows Italy (Anderson 88), or because Chaucer does it — is anxious for the days to pass so that he can marry Hippolyta, conquered queen of the Amazons. There is a degree of passion indicated, however stately this couple seems, but the conquest background being alluded to only vaguely is weird. Theseus opens the play:

Now, fair Hippolyta, our nuptial hour
Draws on apace. Four happy days bring in
Another moon; but O, methinks, how slow
This old moon wanes! She lingers my desires,
Like to a step-dame, or a dowager,
Long withering out a young man’s revenue.
(I.i.1-6)

In other words, waiting around is like when an old lady won’t die so you can finally inherit! Crass analogy! Who is the old lady who isn’t giving over an inheritance?

Hippolyta assures him that “Four days will quickly steep themselves in night; / Four nights will quickly dream away the time” (I.i.7-8). We’re close to the new moon (when the moon is invisible), then, entirely inconsistent with later indications.

Theseus acknowledges, “Hippolyta, I woo’d thee with my sword, / And won thy love doing thee injuries; / But I will wed thee in another key” (I.i.16-18). Music and sound are of thematic importance throughout the play. Master of Revels Philostrate needs to drum up some entertainment, some merriment to whittle away this period of waiting.

With this “more or less stable relationship” (Wells 65) grounding and framing the play, old Egeus interrupts with a problem: both Lysander and Demetrius are wooing his daughter Hermia and he votes for Demetrius even though she wants Lysander. The disapproving and overbearing father figure appears throughout the Shakespeare canon and indeed is an archetype, but Oxfordian thought points to Lord Burghley as the model for Egeus, Polonius, Brabantio, and others (Ogburn and Ogburn 582). Like Desdemona’s father in Othello, Egeus claims that Lysander “bewitch’d” his daughter (I.i.27). Lysander “hast given her rhymes” (I.i.28) and “love-tokens” (I.i.29): “Thou hast by moonlight at her window sung” (I.i.30). Theseus essentially sides with Egeus:

To you your father should be as a god;
One that compos’d your beauties; yea, and one
To whom you are but as a form in wax,
By him imprinted, and within his power
To leave the figure, or disfigure it.
(I.i.47-51)

In other words, Hermia is like an artistic creation, almost a text.

Fortunately, under progressive Athenian law, the woman has choices: Theseus explains that she must either obey, or become a nun “Chaunting faint hymns to the cold fruitless moon” (I.i.73), or die. Supposedly Shakespeare includes an indirect compliment to Queen Elizabeth:

Thrice blessed they that master so their blood
To undergo such maiden pilgrimage;
But earthlier happy is the rose distill’d
Than that which withering on the virgin thorn
Grows, lives, and dies in single blessedness.
(I.i.74-78)

The latter lines “rather diminish its effect” (Barton, Riverside n74f). Yeah. I’d say so.
Take time to pause; and by the next new moon,
. . .
Upon that day either prepare to die
For disobedience to your father’s will,
Or else to wed Demetrius, as he would,
Or on Diana’s altar to protest
For aye, austerity and single life.
(I.i.83-89)
(Queen Elizabeth insisted that her ladies remained unmarried.)
Hermia will soooo die before yielding her “virgin patent up” (I.i.80); and Demetrius insists that Lysander yield his “title to my certain right” (I.i.92).

Lysander’s first line is a wisecrack: “You have her father’s love, Demetrius, / Let me have Hermia’s; do you marry him” (I.i.93-94). Lysander says Demetrius belongs with Helena, “Nedar’s daughter” (I.i.107): an unsolved mystery what this is about. But the law is the law, “Which by no means we may extenuate” (I.i.120), claims Theseus without explanation, after further contentious conversation referencing “estate” (I.i.98), the choice to “prosecute my right” (I.i.105), and “your father’s will” (I.i.118).

The two are left alone. Her choices are misery or death. So Lysander asking, “How now my love? Why is your cheek so pale?” (I.i.128) is pretty obtuse. This part of the scene is usually played as deep, but the trivial singsong nature of the poetry should suggest comedy. They bemoan that fact that “The course of true love never did run smooth” (I.i.134); even relationships that escape the misery of various obstacles tend to be “short as any dream” (I.i.144). Hermia reasons, “If then true lovers have been ever cross’d, / It stands as an edict in destiny” (I.i.150-151). “It is almost as if Lysander has been watching, or reading, Romeo and Juliet” (Garber 214). The two plan to elope; Lysander has “a widow aunt, a dowager, / Of great revenue” (I.i.157-158) who lives not far from Athens. Hermia swears “By all the vows that ever men have broke” (I.i.175) to meet him in the woods. The scene starts to consist of rhyming couplets.

Hermia informs Helena of the planned elopement. Helena is herself lamenting that Demetrius has spurned her for Hermia’s “fairness”: “Were the world mine, Demetrius being bated [excepted], / The rest I’ll give to be to you translated [transformed]” (I.i.190-191). Lysander confirms Hermia’s report of their elopement tomorrow night “when Phoebe doth behold / Her silver visage in the wat’ry glass” (I.i.209-210). “It is odd, though, that Lysander should refer to the moon lighting up the night, for at the very beginning of the play, Theseus has specifically stated that it is only four nights to the next new moon” (Asimov 21). New frame in a revision? Or an intentional dual time frame, out of joint?

Lysander and Hermia exit, and Helena privately agonizes in a discourse on love:

Things base and vile, holding no quantity,
Love can transpose to form and dignity.
Love looks not with the eyes but with the mind;
And therefore is wing’d Cupid painted blind.
(I.i.232-235)

Thinking Demetrius may come back to her if he knows Hermia is gone, Helena decides to tell him of the couple’s plans.

SCENE ii

“Of whatever nationality and historical period the main characters are represented as being, the lower classes are always portrayed as Englishmen of Shakespeare’s own time” (Asimov 22). Here are the “mechanicals” — the local tradesmen. Nick Bottom is a weaver; and a “bottom,” among other things, some rude, is a skein of thread (Asimov 22). Flute is a bellows-maker, appropriate since the sides of a bellows are fluted; Snout is a tinker, and so associated with fixing kettles characterized by their snout or spout; Snug is a joiner (of pieces of wood for furniture); Starveling is a tailor, associated with weakness and unmanliness; and regarding the name Quince for the carpenter, “quines” are blocks of wood used for building (Asimov 22).

Peter Quince, the carpenter, plans an amateur theatrical: “The most lamentable comedy and most cruel death of Pyramus and Thisby” (I.ii.11-12) (from Ovid’s Metamorphoses, Book IV). Since the story resembles Romeo and Juliet, “Did Shakespeare’s satirical treatment of the Pyramus-Thisbe story get him interested in doing a serious treatment of it? Was the serious treatment already written and was he now poking a little good-natured fun at it?” (Asimov 23). The thing will indeed be a “most lamentable comedy.”

In casting the play, each time Quince names a part, Nick Bottom, the weaver, though cast right away as Pyramus, wants to play it — Thisby, then the lion — “yet my chief humor is for a tyrant. I could play Ercles rarely” (I.ii.28-29) — seemingly a reference to Alençon. Later, regarding wigs, we hear, “Some of your French crowns have no hair at all” (I.ii.97-98), with the pun on hair/heir.

In the end we’re not going to need Thisby’s mother or Pyramus’ father: evidence of revision? (Smidt 121). There is serious concern among the troupe that the lion may scare the ladies in the audience out of their wits and all the players would be hanged.

Critically, Bottom is praised as a character. Like Dogberry later and many comic figures in Shakespeare’s plays, he is given to malapropism: using words when he doesn’t know what they mean and bungling them. Indeed, “much of the humor in Shakespeare’s plays rests with the mangling of the English language by the uneducated — something sure to raise patronizing chuckles from the better classes in the audience” (Asimov 24).

Bottom is earthly, ponderous, slow, whereas Puck is will be quick, light, aerial. Bottom is substance, literally the bottom, the ballast. The “bottom” for a weaver is the center of the skein upon which the weaver’s wool is wound; so Bottom is sound at the core (Bloom 150-151). His name can also mean “the last, fundamental, basic” (Garber 233). His good nature is the emotional ballast of the plot. He is the best of all weavers — equally at home anywhere with no discord for him in any of the overlapping realms of the play. Even transformed, his inner self is unfazed (Bloom 150-151). The metamorphosis is a mere externality for him and he is comfortable in all realms shown in this play (Goddard, I 79). “It is another interesting fact that the Veres had long owned the manor-house at Lavenham, which was the center of the weaving industry. Thus Oxford took the part of a weaver. But pre-eminently he was a weaver of dreams” or plays (Ogburn and Ogburn 595).

The players want to rehearse away from the crowds: “At the Duke’s Oak we meet” (I.ii.103). Sounds like a tree, but again, “Duke” is an anachronism. Richard Roe, realizing that there are no legitimate references to Athens or Greece in the play, but that a town a short distance from Manua named Sabbioneta was known as La Piccola Atena = “Little Athens.” It was built during the reign of Vaspasiano Gonzaga in the sixteenth century (Roe 180), and one of its architectural passageways is still known as il Quercia dei Duca = “the Duke’s Oak” (Roe 182-183)